She Married a Cop

Cartoon producer Jean Parker is looking for a singer for her new cartoon. When her auditions in her Sutton Place apartment disturb the neighbors, cop Phil Regan shows up to tell them to pipe down. She discovers he is a fine soprano, and her boss, Jerome Cowan, hires him at $300 a week to sing the role, but no one tells him it's for a cartoon. Meanwhile, Regan and Miss Parker get married. When Regan attends his sneak preview and discovers the truth, he walks out and returns to 10th Avenue, whither Miss Parker follows him.

It's thoroughly idiot-plotted, as you can see, but despite that, all the individual parts work, from the Termite Terrace animation, to Oscar O'Shea as Regan's stereotyped father. Somehow this was an Oscar nomination for best music and score for Cy Feuer. With Peggy Ryan, Mary Gordon, and Horace McMahon.

Like his character, Regan started out as a cop, then became the radio's "Romantic Singer of Romantic Songs." His movie career extended to 1950. He was convicted of bribery in 1972, and died in 1996 at the age of 89.

This B-movie from Republic features Jean Parker (Linda) and Phil Regan (Jimmy). When the story begins, Linda is a director of cartoons for Mammoth Pictures and she's trying to find the right singing voice for a cartoon pig. The three guys who audition are pretty bad and eventually she happens upon a policeman, Jimmy, and convinces him he'll be a movie star. But what she neglected to tell him it will be as a cartoon character. The two fall in love and quickly marry. Only after they marry does he learn the truth about his film career and he runs off and sulks for most of the rest of the film.

This has a decent kernel of a story and I liked seeing a lady cartoon director. But the reaction of everyone to seeing the cartoon and hearing Jimmy's voice seemed way, way overdone....as if it was the funniest cartoon ever made. It clearly wasn't funny at all....and Jimmy's reaction to this also seemed overdone. All in all, the fine momentum of the first portion of the film just wasn't sustained through the rest of the story...making it a time passer and nothing more.